Deep Sea Floor Communities

About 15 years ago several fascinating discoveries were made in this sparsely populated environment.

Deep sea floor communities.

Which of the following is not true of deep ocean. However environmental standards for seafloor integrity and recovery from environmental impacts are missing. However water never freezes in the deep sea note that because of salt seawater freezes at 1 8 c. During a trawling expedition a bunch of woody material was recovered from the bottom.

They are defined by oceanographers as independent. We revisited the only midsize deep sea disturbance and recolonization experiment carried out in 1989 in the peru basin nodule field to compare habitat integrity. A seamount is a large geologic landform that rises from the ocean floor but that does not reach to the water s surface and thus is not an island islet or cliff rock seamounts are typically formed from extinct volcanoes that rise abruptly and are usually found rising from the seafloor to 1 000 4 000 m 3 300 13 100 ft in height. Scientists have long assumed that life on earth originated in the oceans and the recent discovery of communities of microbes and animals that congregate around hot spring vents in the deep sea has buoyed speculation that the earliest life on our planet may have occurred in the depths of the ocean in the absence of sunlight.

Along mid ocean ridges where tectonic plates spread apart magma rises and cools to form new crust and volcanic mountain chains. The abyssal plain areas like deep sea coral whale falls and brine pools polar regions such as the antarctic and arctic coral reefs the deep sea such as the community found in the abyssal water column hydrothermal vents kelp forests mangroves the open ocean rocky shores salt marshes and mudflats and. Feature is exemplified by east africa the rhine valley and the baikal in siberia. Most of the deep sea floor in the gulf of mexico is composed of soft rather featureless muddy sediment.

A deep sea community is any community of organisms associated by a shared habitat in the deep sea deep sea communities remain largely unexplored due to the technological and logistical challenges and expense involved in visiting this remote biome because of the unique challenges particularly the high barometric pressure extremes of temperature and absence of light it was long believed. With the exception of hydrothermal vent communities where hot water is emitted into the cold waters the deep sea temperature remains between about 1 to about 4 c. The conditions of the deep ocean such as eternal darkness cold temperatures hypersalinity and high pressure limits the extent of deep ocean floor communities. What feature of the ocean floor develops where the oceanic lithosphere bends downward and sinks into the mantle.

Deep sea vent communities. Hydrothermal vents are like geysers or hot springs on the ocean floor. Future supplies of rare minerals for global industries with high tech products may depend on deep sea mining. Seawater circulates deep in the ocean s crust and becomes super heated by hot magma.